BRIDGE: An Acceptance Gate to Block False Improvements in Model Updates, with a Retrospective Clinical Evaluation

arXiv:2610.29515v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Models are updated repeatedly, and an update that looks better on validation data but not on new data is a false improvement that can misguide clinical decisions. The naive rule accepts every positive validation gain and is optimistic when the same data choose and judge the update. BRIDGE is a model-agnostic acceptance gate that decides each update from predictions and the available labels, with fixed settings. Each fold of the data judges the update chosen on the other folds (cross-fitting) to reduce selection bias; acceptance requires the gain's lower bootstrap bound to exceed a margin. The four settings are (A) 11 new datasets, (B) synthetic tasks, (C) 12 retrospective clinical tasks, and (D) 39 supporting datasets. The false-improvement rate falls from 19.1% (naive) to 1.1% (BRIDGE) in (A), 20.7% to 1.7% (B), 20.0% to 0% (C), and 12.5% to 0.5% (D); every 95% confidence interval of the reduction over datasets or tasks excludes zero (not over the clinical sources). An equal-size random draw from the naive acceptances contains more false improvements in (A)-(E) (post hoc, p<0.001). On the OpenML collection (E) of 14 new datasets, the false-improvement rate falls from 25.6% to 1.0%. BRIDGE removes 97% to 100% of the false improvements that the naive rule accepts, and its mean gain per deployed update is 1.8 to 3.1 times the naive rule's. The 95% upper bound on the false-improvement rate is below 5.5%: formal in (B) for independent tasks (3.56%), and conditional on the real data tested (0.33% to 5.40%).